International Spatial Cognition Summer Institute

(ISCSI 2013)

University of California, Santa Barbara, August 11-25 2013

The campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the site of ISCSI 2013, the International Spatial Cognition Summer Institute. The Institute was held from August 11-25 and was a combined summer school, conference, and workshop on the interdisciplinary field of spatial cognition, i.e., the study of spatial perception, thinking, reasoning, and communication by humans, nonhuman animals, and computational entities such as robots. Participants included internationally prominent instructors from geography, cartography, and geographic information science; cognitive, developmental, and environmental psychology; computer and information science; linguistics; architecture; and neuroscience. There were 56 students from 7 countries, including Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States; they were primarily graduate students and early-career researchers from these disciplines. The Institute followed up the successful ISCSI 2003 held in Bad Zwischenahn, Germany.

Feedback from graduate and post-doc attendees was universally positive. As third-year graduate student Corinne Holmes at Temple University stated, “It was surreal to start your day with a run adjacent to the ocean, fill your day with talks from some of the most influential researchers in your field, and end your day learning about ‘up and coming’ studies from your fellow colleagues.” And the day did not seem to end there. Small break-out sessions could be seen scattered around campus following the academic day. In addition to impromptu break-out sessions, a five-mile walk ending at Goleta beach provided students an excellent opportunity to get one-on-one time with PIs and discuss various research ideas. Corinne said, “I came to ISCSI with two ideas for future research, and after multiple discussions, I’m leaving with about ten… Now I just have to figure out how I am going to get them all done!”

The Institute consisted of sixteen short courses, organized into four pairs of parallel sessions during each week. In addition, students gave short oral presentations of their research activities as they relate to spatial cognition.